Most display devices in the current market are flat screen displays. With the development of new technologies, three-dimensional (3D) display devices start entering the market as well. 3D display technologies are often based on the notion of parallax, the small disparity between observations of a viewer's left eye and right eye, for the viewer to perceive 3D depth. Thus, by providing two separate images with a certain parallax between them for the viewer's left eye and right eye, respectively, the viewer can perceive a 3D image. Further, some 3D technologies may require the viewer to wear certain special auxiliary equipment in order to view the 3D image, such as wearing a 3D helmet, a 3D polarizing glasses or shutter glasses to view the 3D image. Now, there are also autostereoscopic 3D display devices that do not require the viewer to wear any auxiliary equipment. Such autostereoscopic 3D display devices often comprise a normal two-dimensional (2D) flat screen display (a liquid crystal display (LCD), a plasma display panel (PDP) display, a field emission display (FED), and an organic light emitting diode (OLED) display, etc.) coupled with a grating device.
The grating device can be a slit grating type or a lenticular grating type, and thus the corresponding 3D display device can be a slit grating 3D display or a lenticular lens 3D display. However, as limited by materials used to make conventional grating devices, system parameters such as grating position and grating period of the conventional grating devices are fixed and cannot be varied.
Certain technologies have been developed to address such problems. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,493,427 issued to Nomura et al. on Feb. 20, 1996, discloses a 3D display device with a variable lens. The variable lens is formed by an array of cylindrical lenses and optical characteristics of each of the cylindrical lenses can be changed by applying a voltage to change at least one surface shape of the transparent substance of the cylindrical lenses.
Further, the above disclosed variable lens 3D display device also separates pixels of the display screen into two parts, left pixels for generating images for the viewer's left eye and right pixels for generating images for the viewer's right eye. However, because the left pixels and the right pixels respectively use one half of the total pixels of the display screen, the 3D display resolution is also reduced by 50 percent and thus may impact display quality.
The disclosed methods and systems are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.